Dustin Childs and Brian Gorenc of ZDI take the opportunity at Black Hat USA to break down the many vulnerability disclosure issues making patch prioritization a nightmare scenario for many orgs.
BLACK HAT USA – Las Vegas – Keeping up with security-vulnerability patching is challenging at best, but prioritizing which bugs to focus on has become more difficult than ever before, thanks to context-lacking CVSS scores, muddy vendor advisories, and incomplete fixes that leave admins with a false sense of security.
That’s the argument that Brian Gorenc and Dustin Childs, both with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), made from the stage of Black Hat USA during their session, “Calculating Risk in the Era of Obscurity: Reading Between the Lines of Security Advisories.”
ZDI has disclosed more than 10,000 vulnerabilities to vendors across the industry since 2005. Over the course of that time, ZDI communications manager Childs said that he’s noticed a disturbing trend, which is a decrease in patch quality and reduction of communications surrounding security updates.
“The real problem arises when vendors release faulty patches, or inaccurate and incomplete information about those patches that can cause enterprises to miscalculate their risk,” he noted. “Faulty patches can also be a boon to exploit writers, as ‘n-days’ are much easier to use than zero-days.”
The Trouble With CVSS Scores & Patching Priority
